In a production environment, bottlenecks typically occur from time to time at various steps in the process due to a multitude of causes. Such causes may include, but are not limited to, lack of raw materials, personnel shortages, machine malfunctions, non-continuity of the normal process flow, hold orders placed on particular product types due to a discovered process deviation at a previous manufacturing step, misallocation of production resources at a prior step that results in excess buildup of a particular type of unfinished product at a following step.
Prior attempts to deal with the problem of bottlenecks have been less than optimum because they focused on the step immediately preceding the bottleneck, and failed to consider the interrelated nature of the entire production line. What is needed is a look-ahead method for determining optimum production schedules for early production steps based on a system of monitoring in-process part queues at subsequent production steps which represent production bottlenecks. Such a look-ahead method will stop the flow of unneeded parts through the early production step that would not be processed in a timely manner as they pile up at the bottleneck step. Thus, manufacturing resources at the early production step would be better utilized.